Winners Of My 1,000th ColdFusion Post

Last Friday, I posted my 1,000th ColdFusion blog post on Kinky Solutions. In the spirit of loving ColdFusion, I reflected upon the last 8 years of my ColdFusion life regarding what ColdFusion has meant to me and I asked others to share their stories as well. I had said that from those pro-ColdFusion comments, I would pick some winners this morning to receive Amazon.com gift certificates. I wanted to pick those winner randomly. Now, picking random numbers in ColdFusion is a rather straightforward task. But, I wanted to keep this task interesting (it's Monday morning after all). So, rather than just using ColdFusion's RandRange() method, I created a custom RandRange() method powered by Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" search functionality:

<cffunction

name="GoogleRandRange"

access="public"

returntype="numeric"

output="false"

hint="I use Google's Im Feeling Lucky functionality to help pick out a random number.">

Now, obviously, this method is not completely random since the I'm Feeling Lucky site is picked from a finite set of keyword combinations. However, for our purposes (which is just to have fun), this should be sufficient.

Picking The Winners

Once I had the above function in place, I counted up the qualifying comments from my previous post and then called the GoogleRandRange() method four times. Here are the winners of my 1,000th ColdFusion post and a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate:

That is a truly twisted and inspired way to get a random number. I'm a little bummed that you couldn't work QoQ into it, but then I know you need to protect the image of your sanity with the community.

I am the co-founder and lead engineer at InVision App, Inc — the world's leading prototyping,
collaboration & workflow platform. I also rock out in JavaScript and ColdFusion 24x7 and I dream about
promise resolving asynchronously.